Guru Inc.

On the Missionary Men post GM has written an interesting comment, this is my reply.

You are correct about ISKCON placing too much emphasis on a guru. It’s one thing to respect the guru, it’s another thing entirely to think that you are bound to the guru as his/her servant throughout eternity, which is what ISKCON preaches. They take hyperbolic glorifications of gurus found in sastra or from previous acaryas as factual literal truth. In ISKCON you are taught that not only can Prabhupada be like Paramatma i.e. hear and respond to your prayers – in dreams, but also he is like God because you will be HIS servant eternally in the eternal Vaikuntha realm.

And it is not just Prabhupada who has been elevated to deity status. In ISKCON the devotees are encouraged to see the other gurus in the same way as Prabhupada. You will find disciples speaking about their gurus with the same fanatic fervor and delusions of grandeur you see spoken about with Prabhupada.

Gurus in ISKCON are not real gurus as long as they are in ISKCON. They are not allowed to teach according to their own realization. All they are doing is pretending to be gurus. You might as well train a parrot to repeat what Prabhupada said. If they were real gurus they wouldn’t kowtow to GBC mandated dominance over what they can say or do. This is because their positions as guru gives them wealth and power, they are a bad joke, clowns in clown suits, pathetic poseurs, Srila Parrot Swami Maharajas. If they realize that Prabhupada was wrong on some point they cannot mention that without getting into trouble and possibly lose their positions – which generates lots of free income for them.

And if the GBC doesn’t remove them then the mass of fanatic followers of Prabupada will force their hand, as is happening with Devamrta Swami right now. Devamrta Swami is a guru in ISKCON who wrote the following in a Vyasa-Puja offering to Srila Prabhupada. He is being hounded and castigated by the mass of Prabupada zealots for daring to speak on his own realization because it questions some of what Prabhupada and ISKCON teaches as being outdated or improper.

Last night Dhananjaya dasa reminded us of your confidence in your literary solution to the problem of spiritual institutions surviving in the material world. You told him that even if all the GBCs, temple presidents, and pujaris leave your mission, your books are everywhere, and consequently some sincere soul will read them and know exactly how to start the Hare Krsna movement again. You urged that your disciples strive to get the reward for assisting you, but then you declared that even if we fail you, someone else will certainly arise in the future, just by reading your books and get the credit.

Obviously we are fortunate to have the first chance at your mercy-and also, obviously we are expendable.

Since your divine disappearance, twenty-five years have passed. I am wondering if times have changed, how, and to what degree. Thus I am begging for guidance. During your physical presence your books were our be-all and end-all. Now, have we entered, consciously or unconsciously, a new era of ISKCON known as “PPB”-that is, “post-Prabhupada’s books”?

More than a few seasoned devotees and supportive academics opine that indeed it’s time to move on. Maybe, while maintaining our eternal gratitude to you, our founder-acarya, it’s now necessary to evaluate what you have left us and distill whatever part of that legacy should accompany us into the future of a different world and a different ISKCON.

Therefore, amidst the perennial onslaught of time and change in the material world, I clutch at your feet and seek your clarification, since you are the most expert strategist in Lord Caitanya’s contemporary army. And because you cling most tightly to the lotus feet of Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, you are the most divinely pragmatic.

1. What are your expressed desires for your books in relation to the future of ISKCON?
2. How do you see your books in relation to both training future ISKCON devotees and enlightening the present nondevotee population?
3. Amidst the burgeoning potpourri of Gaudiya Vaisnavism outside of India, do you still assert your books are sufficient for bringing us to the zenith of bhakti?
4. What should we do and feel about purports that seem to clash with current scientific, gender, sociological, and political notions and niceties?
5. How are we to commingle the previous acaryas’ literatures with your books, especially since you certainly mention other sastras in your purports?
6. Can your books withstand time? That is, are the purports and language dated-if not now, then in the future?
7. Is emphasis on distributing your books, by whatever method, outmoded? Isn’t ISKCON with out emphasis on mass distribution a breath of fresh air for us?
8. Without a doubt you urged your disciples to write books. What is the relation between our books and yours, with your ISKCON society and beyond?
9. Should our senior devotees take the lead in demonstrating lifelong dependence on your books for their spiritual sustenance and delight? Is there a danger that by doing so they could inhibit their spiritual maturity?

As for your saying that Bhagavat dharma isn’t missionary dharma, that is true. But, Mahaprabhu Sri Krishna Chaitanyadev asked his followers to preach to others the message of Bhagavan Sri Krishna. But you are right in that Prabhupada and others from the Gaudiya Math take that instruction way too far. They teach that missionary work should at best consume 100% of your time and energy, that those who surrender to that ideal are more advanced and closer to and more pleasing to God then all others. Leaders of those organizations use that dogma to advance their own desire for wealth, power, and fame. They exploit the innocence and gullibility of neophyte bhaktas into becoming slaves to their schemes for the accumulation of personal comfort, wealth, fame and power. It is a religious scam in the pursuit of servants-in-bondage, bound to the mental slavery of thinking oneself 100% dependent on the “mercy” of a “guru” for salvation from suffering and samsara.

The bogus guru will tell you that the advanced and dedicated disciple surrenders everything to the guru, the advanced and dedicated disciple rejects family life, rejects society, rejects everything – but 100% submission to the guru 100% of the time. The bogus guru will tell you that you cannot be happy and that you are fallen to some degree from perfection if you seek the warmth and companionship of marriage and family. The bogus guru will tell you that you are 100% dependent on the guru for salvation – because the bogus guru seeks slaves.

In reality the reason the guru is spoken of so highly in sastra is because the role of the guru in pre-industrial society was as the repository of Vedic wisdom. There wasn’t technology which enabled mass production of books, written texts were rare. Generally only brahmins systematically learned Vedic wisdom, they then would became gurus of varying abilities to everyone else. That didn’t mean that all brahmins were automatically accepted as gurus. Also gurus did not have to come from a brahmin family, but usually that was the case. Therefore in traditional Hindu or Vedic culture the guru is taught as being “as good as God” not because he was so special in terms of personal mystic perfection, it was because the guru was the person who was learned in Vedic knowledge, gurus were walking sastra, to one degree or another. Therefore because they were more often then not the only way an average person could access Vedic philosophy, they were held in great esteem. They were given a special status in society, they were worshipped as God’s representative. But it was because they were able to teach Vedic knowledge in a time and place without easy access to Vedic writing from books. Also because they were the repositories of Vedic knowledge they could easily add or subtract from the teachings if they were unscrupulous. That is why interpolation is such a problem with Vedic scriptures. It wasn’t until modern times with the advent and use of the printing press in India that interpolation has become difficult to get away with.

With the advent of easy access to all Vedic scriptures the guru is no longer needed to the degree that was the reality of pre-industrial India. The guru was the “representative of God” because the guru was the only repository of Vedic knowledge accessible to the average person. The guru is still important though, the guru can help you directly if you cannot understand the written word very well, or if you misunderstand it, although with so many bogus gurus – it’s a minefield out there. A guru is not as important as ISKCON and some gurus from Gaudiya Math offshoots want everyone to believe. They seek people beholden to mental slavery in order to supply them with wealth, fame, and power.

Some Chaitanya traditions outside of the Gaudiya Math and ISKCON have concocted another philosophy which enables the guru to exploit gullible neophytes. They claim that unless you take diksa and receive your mantras from their lineages, that the diksa and mantras are useless. They claim that spiritual advancement is dependent upon their sanction due to their lineage being bonafide and others being bogus. That dogma is just another scheme meant for exploitation of neophytes. God, mantras, and spiritual realization, aren’t held hostage by some exploitative poseur in some village in India. “Oh but he doesn’t even take donations” some followers may claim (most of them do take donations). That is a scam as old as time. The “guru” sometimes has to prove he is a real serious tyagi to gullible neophytes by rejecting money…until the big money comes.